The Girl Who Broke the Rules (35 page)

‘I’m not a child any more,’ Veronica had said, digging her nails into the gold leaf on the visitor’s chair. Spattering her nappa Ralph Laurens with gold dust. ‘I can make my own choices. I love Silas.’ Why had she even been sitting there, making excuses to this disengaged automaton?

‘Veronica, he’s not for you. He’s too old. He’s not in our league.’

‘But he’s good enough to work with you, right? You’re such a hypocrite, Dad.’

‘He worked
for
me. Don’t call me Dad.’ Her father, Papa Alpha, donned his glasses and looked down his nose at her.

‘Or what? What the hell can you do about it, if I call you Dad or keep seeing Silas?’

‘I can stop your allowance.’

He had had a point, the old man. Life without the allowance would be intolerable. The trust fund Mama had set up for her was pitiful. At twenty-one, she had inherited a shitty Chevvy and a cramped, tumbledown shack in the Hamptons that was no more than 2000 square feet. The bulk of the money and property had become the sole preserve of her father. Other than what he deigned to give her as an allowance, she wouldn’t get a bean out of the old bastard until he died. And that was providing he didn’t hook up with some Hollywood starlet in the interim and leave it all to her or some new-age, third-eye bullshit factory in the Hills.

‘Okay! Okay!’ she had said. Holding up her hands in surrender. ‘I’ll let him down gently.’

He had given the command and had expected her to obey. Of course, she hadn’t. She had exited his consultation rooms with her flight ticket in her handbag. Had the driver take her straight to Heathrow, where she had met up with Silas under the departures board, Cambodia-bound. A passionate kiss bonding them in their worthy subterfuge.

At the other end, she had been surprised by the primitive feel of the place. Even when she had taken herself off to explore what Papa had stipulated as no-go neighbourhoods in New York, she had never seen such dereliction before as in Phnom Penh. Fat black electrical cables strung from one side of the street to another between crumbling 60s low-rise blocks, like a giant, intricate cat’s cradle. A child dressed in filthy rags, squatting in the street and defecating into open drains. Makeshift food stalls with colourful awnings that said this was a ghost city only just being reclaimed. The place had an honesty to it.

When they had made for the train, bound for the spot where the charity was currently clearing mines, Silas had put his arm around her.

‘What do you think, my love?’ he had asked, kissing her forehead. Leading her along the tracks, overgrown with grass. Pushing the peasants out of the way as they tried to hawk food on platters they were carrying on their heads to the passengers. Helping her onto the packed train, along with the small suitcase that they were sharing.

Though she was wilting from the combination of jetlag and intense heat, she was intoxicated. The sunshine seemed stronger here. She was fascinated by the sound of people talking animatedly in a language that was completely foreign to her. Could smell their poverty and the vitality that came with it, pungent on the air. So different from the over-indulged westerners her parents mixed with – sickly sweet, white patricians, poisoning everything around them with their own narcotic-fed malignancies. ‘It’s amazing. This is the real world. I can’t believe it, Silas. I feel free.’ She pointed to the Cambodian men who were perched on the top of the carriages. ‘I want to go on the roof!’

Silas smiled and shook his head. ‘Too dangerous for you, my princess.’

‘You’re so thoughtful,’ she had said, marvelling that she had found an all-consuming love like this – his was a beautiful, illuminating soul in a world of sham and material misery.

On the journey, he had talked animatedly about his work, assisting the emergency medical teams near the border, who operated on the victims of landmines.

‘You must try to be brave when you see them,’ he had said, steadying her when the train jolted over intersection points. ‘There are thousands of them. Mostly men, but women and children too.’ Feverish, as he described their injuries to her. ‘Some of them have no legs at all. Some have lost arms. They get about on crutches or little carts with wheels. Last time I was over here, I saw people begging on the streets of Phnom Penh. They only had torsos, some of them. It’s dreadful.’ He had a tear in his eye, but there was something behind the show of sadness that bordered on excitement and fascination. Veronica knew enough by now of her lover’s sexual proclivities to know that his interest in amputees went beyond the realm of the medical. Still, turning a blind eye to the quirks of this exceptional man was the least she could do. He felt like something so much better than family.

She looked out at the sweltering green tangle as the train carved its way through jungle, over rickety bridges that traversed ravines and across the flats of swamp-like rice paddies. Cambodia was the polar opposite to New York or London or Berlin. It was beautiful and dreadful all at once.

During their journey, he explained how the Vietnamese military had used the landmines to push the Khmer Rouge over the border into Thailand, and how the mines ran as a lethal barrier along the entire length of the border.

She had worked as a nurse, there. Smelling and touching for the first time in her life the filth and stink of ordinary people. Watching Silas administer forgetful anaesthetic to the injured, who writhed in agony, carried by relatives onto the operating table. The surgeons’ nimble fingers cut and sutured with great skill. Talking French or English or German. All European doctors, earning the shine on their halo before disappearing off back to their own promised lands of private practice and an excellent pension scheme. Veronica felt, as a novelty, a certain reverential regard for her father, who performed the odd ground-breaking cosmetic procedure for the truly needy and disfigured, in amongst the arse-lifts and lipo for the narcissists of Knightsbridge and the Upper East Side who refused to accept the inevitability of decay.

It had been their second week in the small, makeshift hospital. The sun had still been strong and the heat had bounced off the dirt. Strolling back to their humble, bombed-out accommodation, arm-in-arm, they had walked through a thicket. Some fifty metres ahead, a woman had carried a fat bag of clothing on her head. A T-shirt hanging out of the load was a giveaway. Washing day.

‘Let’s get a shower and then take an early dinner,’ Silas had said. ‘I quite fancy sitting out front with a beer or two.’

‘Sounds good,’ Veronica had said, patting his arm.

‘And I’ve got something for you. A gift.’ From his shorts pocket, he took out a small package wrapped in Cambodian newspaper. Covered in the elegant scrolling calligraphy of Khmer.

‘For me?’ Veronica had smiled. Started to unwrap the gift. It was a clay figurine. Local art, showing a female figure, missing her arms. It was underwhelming. ‘That’s very thoughtful. Thanks.’

‘I’m going to buy some new pieces for my collection, while we’re here,’ he had said. ‘The Cambodians show exquisite skill in their clay work. We should visit a workshop when we get a day off.’

‘I’m not sure—’

The explosion had knocked her to the ground. Before she had fallen, she was aware of a cloud of red mist colouring the space where the woman with the bag of washing had been standing. Her ears ringing with tinnitus. Some way off, the woman had screamed. Babygros and underpants hanging from the trees. Dazed, Veronica had noticed Silas was no longer by her side. Had he been injured?

She looked up to see that he had run to the woman’s aid. Caught up with him, to find him kneeling next to the dying woman, masturbating. An unsettling light in his glazed eyes. A faraway look that she had sensed was focussed on something in the past.

‘Silas! For fuck’s sake. Help her!’

And now, back in the sweat-drenched stink of Phnom Penh, in the privacy of their concrete ‘hotel’, which was no more than a squalid tumbledown shell, whose original inhabitants may or may not have been buried alive in Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, Veronica was faced with a dilemma.

‘Come on,’ Silas said, ferociously tugging on his erection. Breathing the stench from the diesel-powered generators and putrefying vegetable waste strewn along the street below in and out and in and out through flaring nostrils. ‘Squeeze her neck. It will be easy for a strong girl like you. Put her out of her misery.’

‘And what if I don’t?’ she asked.

‘You will,’ he said. ‘You love me.’

‘I won’t. I can’t,’ she said. ‘Just let her go. She doesn’t even understand a word you’ve been saying. All she knows is you’re some kinked john.’

Silas continued to masturbate, slowing down, now. Savouring the prostitute’s anguish, perhaps.

‘Silas, you’re acting crazy. Stop.’

When Silas Holm put his hands around the neck of the young girl he had paid for pleasure by the hour; when he had choked the life from her twitching body, Veronica wondered in earnest if Papa had been more intuitive than she had hitherto given him credit for. When Silas had thrown the dead prostitute into the dumpster at the back of the hotel under cover of darkness, Veronica wondered if she would be next.

CHAPTER 67

Amsterdam, mortuary, 29 January

‘This is the worst thing I’ve seen in years,’ Marianne de Koninck said, looking dolefully at the girl on her slab. A blind, blonde angel, probably fair of face when whole, with the red and white of her ribs peeled back like ghastly wings put there by the devil himself. ‘The poor little mite can’t be more than eleven or twelve. Look what the beast has done to her. I know she’s been treated in exactly the same way as the other victims, but…’ She shook her head. Exhaled sharply and clicked off her voice recorder.

Van den Bergen hugged himself tight. Ran his hand over his stubble and closed his eyes. Perhaps this was it. The end of the road for him as a policeman. It was a hateful job he did, year in, year out, though by God, he did it well. But he was no longer sure he could find the light in amongst so much darkness. It was just overpowering.

‘Somehow it seems worse this time,’ he said. ‘Right?’

Until now, he had been averting his gaze from the child’s body. Staring at some of the surgical equipment. The tiles on the floor. Anything but the girl’s remains. He turned to George, who was sitting in silence on the other side of the mortuary. ‘What sort of monster does this to a child, George? Tell us.’

But George appeared to be crying. Rigid in her chair, her stillness punctuated only by intermittent heaving, as she sobbed noiselessly. Van den Bergen felt an incredibly strong urge to walk over to her. Put his hand on her shoulder. Show her he cared and that he would make it all better. But he couldn’t. It was impossible to make her unsee what she had seen. He had failed to protect her. And he knew, if he embraced George and Marianne saw the close physical rapport that they shared, the pathologist would realise that they had become more than just colleagues.

His musings were interrupted by a familiar face, beaming at him from the threshold of the mortuary entrance.

‘Sabine! Come in! Come in!’ Marianne beckoned her friend inside. She turned to van den Bergen. ‘Given the fact we’re dealing with a child victim, I wanted to get Sabine in again to give the girl the once-over. What she doesn’t know about the physiology of children, isn’t worth knowing.’ Turned to George. ‘Have you met Dr Schalks?’

George had folded her arms high on her chest. Sat bolt upright in her chair. ‘All right, Sabrina? Your reputation precedes you,’ she said, sounding as though the words were sticking just a little in her throat. Notably, George did not offer the newcomer more than a nod in greeting. And he guessed she had deliberately called her by the wrong name.

Van den Bergen sat on his hands to disguise the fact that he was squirming in the presence of his young lover and the attractive, middle-aged paediatrician who had recently engaged him in several bouts of professional flirtation. Hadn’t she showed up at reception for him, bearing a tray of cakes? He had told George and the others that a grateful mugging victim had left them for the team. Hadn’t she called and invited him to her fundraising gala dinner in aid of the hospital she was building in Kosovo? He had opted to make a donation of fifty euros to the cause instead. It was all he could afford – on every level.

After donning protective clothing, Sabine proceeded to examine the girl’s corpse. Van den Bergen couldn’t help but be impressed by her cool demeanour. Really professional. Tears standing in her eyes at the end, though.

‘Where was the girl found?’ she asked.

‘On Middenweg. In a little thicket of trees,’ van den Bergen said. ‘Right by the New East Arboretum. It’s a very public place. Lots of traffic. Right on a tram route. I have no idea how our murderer came to dump her body there without being seen.’

He recapped all that he and George had discovered so far.

Sabine raised an eyebrow. Looked alarmed. ‘People trafficking? England as well? Hasselblad told me you’re looking for a serial killer with an interest in paedophilia.’ Turned to Marianne. ‘And I thought you said, Daan Strietman—’

A tight-lipped Marianne nodded, not bothering to conceal her displeasure. ‘I’ve got five bodies in the fridges still need autopsies performing on them. My number two gets arrested in the middle of bloody flu season on trumped-up charges.’

A certain ingrained loyalty resonated within van den Bergen. Though privately he had nothing but disdain for Hasselblad, he would not publicly undermine the authority of his superior. ‘Only time will tell if they’re bona fide charges or not, Marianne. I’ll be looking into it now I’m back. We can’t rule out the possibility Strietman is involved somehow if it’s a trafficking ring,’ he said. ‘Especially since he’s been linked to the Valeriusstraat builder. I have questions that still need answers, as far as that mattress goes. How did it get there? Whose blood is on it? And I want to know why the forensics report on Linda Lepiks’ place has conveniently gone astray. Let’s not jump to any conclusions, shall we?’